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Informed Dissent: One Blogger’s Critique of the Afghan War

By C.J. Chivers December 7, 2010 3:00 pmDecember 7, 2010 3:00 pm

Registan.netJoshua Foust’s blog on Central Asian affairs is anthologized in a new book, “Afghanistan Journal.”

FORWARD OPERATING BASE WILSON, Afghanistan — In 2006, as levels of violence in Afghanistan were rising sharply, a new voice entered the online debate about the United States’ military campaign. The Afghan war was then in its back-burner status, relegated behind the Pentagon’s fight in Iraq.

The voice belonged to Joshua Foust, an unknown American student of Central Asia who began posting his opinions and analyses on www.registan.net, a blog focusing on Central Asian affairs.

Four years on, Mr. Foust is no longer an unknown. He has become — through will power, omnivorous appetite, field work as a defense consultant and a strong disgust at analytical mediocrity — an attuned observer of the American-led effort in Afghanistan. Today he occupies a place in the circle of prolific bloggers on all things Afghan, a gadfly commentator who has recently completed a new book, “Afghanistan Journal: Selections From Registan.net.”

As advertised, Afghanistan Journal is a 250-page anthology of Mr. Foust’s post-by-post journey to understand Afghanistan and its latest war. And while the word journal certainly describes the format, the book serves as something more. The collection bluntly challenges many of the people, in and out of the military, organizing or speaking for the war, and submits their assumptions to a determined inquiry.

Mr. Foust, though he has softened his language and tone lately, often does not play nice. Few are spared in these pages — generals, diplomats, think-tankers, authors and journalists all suffer Mr. Foust’s sting. This wide target selection fits a binding theme. In his assessment, the problems facing the United States effort in Afghanistan are not just grand in scale and complexity, but also, more worriedly, largely misunderstood by those guiding Afghanistan and the West through the war.

“After eight years of setbacks, missteps, minor successes, and lots of grandiose essays about how to solve everything in Afghanistan, our government still has no idea what it’s doing there,” Mr. Foust writes in the book’s preface.

“It’s common,” he adds, “to find analysis based on rumor, or on discredited century-old ethnographies, or on mere assumption — unsourced, pandering assertions that can’t withstand the slightest scrutiny. This sort of work would never make it past an undergraduate professor, yet it floods the intelligence and defense communities.”

Needless to say, Mr. Foust is not optimistic.

By 2009, as a contractor the Army’s Human Terrain System, Mr. Foust was an insider engaging with rural Afghans and offering advice to commanders in the field on how to operate in line with what villagers wanted; he was, in short, a tactical-level ambassador. Since returning home, he has sown public doubts that the war, as waged, can succeed.

Mr. Foust’s unease is based on pragmatics, and not politics. He sees an American interest in success in Afghanistan. His concern for Afghans feels genuine. His arguments against the war’s course ultimately are similar to what many military veterans of the war privately say. Remaking Afghanistan, in his view, is extraordinarily hard. And the American military and foreign policy establishments are all but incapable of the task, suffering from what he calls “a dogged refusal to learn from our mistakes.”

To support these conclusions, Afghanistan Journal is part travelogue and part anthology, a string of posts organized under various headings. “Dispatches From FOBistan” (a collection of his observations on so called Forward Operating Bases, or FOBs), “Policy,” and “Counternarcotics” are among the most interesting.

His brief chapter on Kapisa Province captures an arc common to Americans who visit Afghanistan and examine the war up close. At first, he sees hope, and many small and positive steps by the Americans and Afghan police officers and soldiers working in the area. As time passes and he learns more, disappointment creeps in. His hope dims. In the next-to-last post, he writes, “Kapisa Totters.” In the final entry, the Afghan deputy police commander in the province has been arrested, accused of collaborating with insurgents who plant bombs.

The journal’s selections display Mr. Foust’s spirit of inquiry and his work ethic, which has the feel of obsession, until the author emerges as both an engaged citizen-blogger and frustrated insider. In a period when the Afghan war lies on the margins of the American political discourse, these are welcome roles.

Is Mr. Foust right, either in the particulars of his arguments or in his conclusions?

Let’s leave that to you. Each reader will react differently. Some will not appreciate his tendency toward name-calling. (A behavior he has appeared to regret as he has matured as a writer.) Many will agree with some sections and quarrel with others, or argue with several of his own passing assessments. I don’t think he would mind. Read this book in the spirit of its author’s intention, all the while remembering that if Mr. Foust were to have a slogan, it might be this: “What’s your evidence?”

It is a worthy question, the more so when examining something as expensive and terrible as war. For posing it, explicitly and implicitly, again and again, Mr. Foust has provided a public service.

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